Alternative ​Strategy - Marketing Through a menu of Reels:
Summary
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Over the past year we've studied the human aspect of network effects with a general interest towards how to better market our restaurants into the future. I will here demonstrate how we believe we've found a new way to plug any restaurant into the internet, with massive upside effects in both short & long term.
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Most social media platforms have shifted their focus towards reels of late, 10-60 second captivating videos that each platforms respective algorithms feed to users congruent with their previous online preferences. A menu of reels remain within the network in perpetuity, with each dish seeking out its own perfect audience for weeks, months and years after posting. It's the complete opposite of a regular posts, storys or media articles that may help for a short period, then die off.
Since it's reasonable to assume that these platforms algorithms are far more sophisticated at finding the correct audience than we as restaurant operators could ever be, this strategy throws any restaurant that uses it into a kind of orbit, rather than constantly falling back down to earth in a marketing sense.
Satisfying & aspirational food content has long since been a mainstay on every platform, but until now, there's really none where the viewer could actually convert to a sale, book a table & purchase the food they're watching.
It seems to us that Restaurants haven't yet thought it worth it to generate content of this manner & therein lies the opportunity we've already began to enjoy the benefits of.
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Case Study
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To test this thesis, I implemented this strategy with a recent project in Taipei - to quite astonishing results in just a few weeks.
We filmed the entire menu into short dishes, with a specific format & created an IG page into a menu of reels with prices and dish titles that seek out would be customers 24/7 365 in perpetuity. This restaurants menu is becoming a marketing engine relentlessly seeking out its own customers dish by dish forever at zero cost.
I also created a page on TikTok & posted a few of these videos at the beginning of the Year.
Different platforms reach an audience at different speeds, but over the long term it's rational to assume the people are the same & the end result over the long term will be similar.
This is the state of that page on Jan 1st. ​
This is the state of that page as of today Jan 10th. ​
Not a single penny has been spent on any kind of promotion here, just a few hashtags, great videos & let the algorithm and peoples preferences do the rest, needless to say this restaurant has benefitted and will continue to benefit from this strategy since it keeps working away by itself.
This restaurants food has already gained over 9 million views across the world with a total watched time of over 6 years for a restaurant that's been open to the public for just two days at time of writing.
Global vs Local Audience
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Since this strategy functions without regard geographic location or language, at a cursory glance it may seem like overkill to have millions of people in the UK or USA fawning over the food in a restaurant served in Taipei that they would never purchase. Granted.
What's key to remember is that none of these views are paid for, it's all organic. To have for example British food, or Mexican Food available to a Taiwanese market, where the Taiwanese can see thousands of comments of people from those respective countries admiring its quality, validating it constitutes the kind of priceless marketing we as restauranteurs could have only dreamt of. A foreign restaurant with a global online footprint sets itself above all competitors. This case study was started from 0 followers, The Tavernist already has a great base of thousands of local followers which should allow even faster growth through network effects.
Restaurants currently operate social media as a liability of sorts, an expense to be paid in order to reach customers. If the food & content is high enough quality & is adequately interesting executed correctly those roles can be reversed, where the views become so great that the account actually generates value rather than extracting it.
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I appreciate this is all rather abstract, zoomed out & not the common vernacular of restauranteurs. To bring it back to a more pragmatic reality - I'll just leave you with this thought; Imagine what it would be like if you were running a restaurant across the street from us, competing against us for customers while we have found a way to bend the eyes of millions of people around the world towards our food. As you continue to implement traditional strategies... Who do you think would win?